Forget, Memory

The Whys of the Oubliette Film

Recent popular films on memory loss raise the question of whether it’s something to fear—or enjoy.

The recent rash of films concerning memory
loss (and the popularity of these films) strikes me as a quixotic curiosity.
What is it about the idea of losing one’s memory that fascinates so
many of us? Reaching far beyond standard soap-opera amnesia, the concept
of forgetting has poked its chubby little finger into every cinematic type
of pie. From the fluffy meringue of romantic comedy in Fifty First Dates to
the continental Bavarian cream of action-packed thrillers like The Bourne
Identity, an epidemic fixation on recall is undeniable. So why has the
concept of forgetting become such a muse for contemporary screenwriters and
a favorite of modern audiences?

A friend of mine predictably pointed to 9/11 as the source for our new-found
addiction to memory loss, pondering a subliminal rebellion against a culture
bent on remembering painful events in an effort to meaning-make in the face
of a refreshed existentialist crisis. Another offered the Baby Boomers’ forthcoming
golden years as an explanation: perhaps the fear of senility or Alzheimer’s
of such a large portion of the population is reflected in the anxiety of
these films.

But that begs the question, are we anxious about memory loss? Or do these
movies show us enjoying an infantile freedom from recollection?

Certainly Memento is
an illustration of the sense of panic accompanying perpetual amnesia. How
much of a person’s identity is caught in the web of memory has been
a philosophical and neurological debate for decades. Human curiosity is part
of what theologians, philosophers, and humanists have argued distinguishes
us from our thumbless and furry companions, and our need/want to know has
always been the central theme in creation myths. But from Prometheus to Eve,
knowledge reveals itself to be a burdensome and inexplicable gift, riddled
with adult responsibility and the human lack of ability to handle that responsibility.
Our desire to know defeats us because of the lingering debt to history, and
the action implied therein, that comes as the price of enlightenment. So
our relationship with knowledge, and by extension memory, is ambiguous.

If the issue is a shirking of adult duty, then the even-more ambiguous Freud
is the predictable authority. In Freudian terms, we could see the obsession
with memory loss (and the resulting anxiety it seems to provoke in these
films’ characters) as representative of our fear of vulnerability or
a return to the helplessness of childhood, despite our unconscious desire
for second infancy. In movies from Total Recall (which, admittedly,
is not the best example of a recent film) to Memento, there is a
real sense that memory serves as a defense mechanism against those who (still
retaining their memories) would take advantage of us. And that without our
precious recollections, we would be more toyed with than Job. The truism
is again resurrected: knowledge equals power. If we lose our ability to remember,
we lose a big chunk of our humanity and self-identity.

But does that really pan out? Thinking about the most recent of these cinematic
oubliettes, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we see the erasure
of experience in action. The process is depicted as an adventure, half-nightmare,
half-fantasy. And in true Kaufman fashion, the mind is the most colorful
landscape available. In this film we see anxiety provoked by the relinquishing
of control. The people left in charge when you lose your memory are shown
always abusing that power. (In Eternal Sunshine, Kirsten Dunst and
Mark Ruffalo get high and dance naked on Jim Carrey, practically using him
for an ashtray in the process, while his and Winslet’s personal moments
are scrubbed away; Elijah Wood’s character attempts to use Winslet’s
abandoned affections to get a little; and the good doctor behind it all takes
advantage of his lovestruck receptionist’s fuzzy recollections of their
affair.)

It could be, however, that the popularity of forgetfulness in films
is just symptomatic of our larger interest (however deep) in the world of
the psychological interior. Movies like What Dreams May Come, Fight
Club, and A Beautiful Mind could be added to the genre sketched
above if that were the case. But is that the entirety of it? We’ve
been a culture fixated on the mind for a long time, and there’s something
unwieldy, disorderly, and a bit unnerving about memory in particular that
defies our attempts to dub others either “normal” or “insane.” Lurking
in these other mind-oriented films is the safeness of “the other.” The
dead in What Dreams May Come are teetering on the precipice of insanity
from the beginning, but more importantly they’re not us because
they’re dead. A Beautiful Mind’s mathematician is a
schizophrenic genius, so he’s “other” for two reasons:
he’s schizophrenic and he’s a genius (assuming I’m
not the only non-genius who’s a part of the theatre-going public).
But the characters from the recent amnesia films are flawed, affable, and
reflect the average Joe. Their fears and desires are thus closer to our own
and not so easy to put aside.

The Hollywood storyline that surfaces in all of these movies is that the
freedom from memory is the freedom to be happy and still maintain
self-identity. While the characters’ curiosity seems to paradoxically
increase in direct proportion to how little they remember, they remain wholly
themselves despite their fragmented vision of the past. Drew Barrymore’s
amnesiac, daily wooed anew, lives out in many ways the best fantasy
of all the characters in this genre, falling in love and never losing that
sense of newness that inevitably fades from relationships that last longer
than a day. Mary
still falls for the father-figure psychiatrist (Wilkinson), and Clementine
is still instantly attracted to Joel in Eternal Sunshine. Matt Damon’s
character even retains his kung-fu mastery and assassin’s knowledge
of handguns in The Bourne Identity (so does the Governator in Total
Recall,
to dip back once again into the possibly irrelevant). Memento’s
Leonard Shelby gets the privilege of creating his own reality everyday, becoming
a questing hero in his own mind, though possibly a villain in reality. But
what does he care? He won’t remember.

The same could be said for following this line of reasoning: suspend disbelief
almost to the point of absurdity to pretend that these popular films are extremely
intertextual and are truly emblematic of a social-psychological
phenomenon. Really what difference could it possibly make? You could just
forget that you ever considered it.

That’s really the point though, isn’t it? We don’t have
the luxury of forgetting, which is I think what we’d all really like
to do, hence these films’ insurgence in the theatres. Perhaps we have embraced
the amnesiac thriller because we’ve witnessed the failure of the psychiatric
thriller (Analyze That!) and we still have memories with which we
cannot or will not come to terms.

The anxieties and fears these films deal with are the result of imagining
the consequences and confusions of a memory-free existence. They consider
what’s to be lost—but considering the downfalls of amnesia wouldn’t
be worth it if we weren’t interested in the possibility of escapism
and carefree happiness that a spotless mind offers. :::

Molly O’Donnell is
a graduate student of English literature at the College of Notre Dame of
Maryland and a production editor at INFORMS in Baltimore, Maryland.